A Step Forward for the Digital Markets Act, But Big Questions Remain

Max von Thun is the Director of Europe & Transatlantic Partnerships at the Open Markets Institute, based in Brussels.  Flags in front of the European Commission. Last week, the European Commission published its long-awaited list of tech giants and services designated as gatekeepers under the flagship Digital Markets Act (DMA). A response to the failures of traditional competition law to rein in Big Tech, the DMA – which entered into EU law last year – requires gatekeepers to comply with a wide range of obligations designed to prevent anti-competitive behavior and promote contestability in digital markets. The wide-ranging obligations for gatekeepers include enabling interoperability between competing messaging services, allowing end users to download third-party app stores, and refraining from self-preferencing one’s own services.  In total, six gatekeepers (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, TikTok owner Bytedance, Meta, and Microsoft) and 22 “core platform services” (a set of in-scope services defined exhaustively in the legislation) featured in the Commission’s gatekeeper list. As the Commission’s graphic below demonstrates, this list includes many of the usual suspects that have posed a problem for competition authorities, from Google Shopping (subject to the Commission’s very first investigation into the company back in 2010) and Apple’s App Store (notorious for extracting eye-watering fees from developers) to Amazon’s ubiquitous Marketplace and Meta’s dominant advertising business.  But the list also includes plenty of services that have so far escaped significant antitrust scrutiny, including LinkedIn, Google Maps, Safari, and Whatsapp. A service is considered a gatekeeper as long as it meets the…A Step Forward for the Digital Markets Act, But Big Questions Remain